JULIAN OPIE, RUTH WITH CIGARETTE 5, RUTH WITH CIGARETTE SERIES, SIGNED DIGITAL PRINT, EDITION OF 50, 2005
The final print from Julian Opie’s Ruth With Cigarette series is Ruth With Cigarette 5 that shows a half-length portrait of an art collector living in Geneva who commissioned the portrait. The figure is shown semi-undressed with her breasts partially exposed by Opie’s rendering of a thin blouse that hangs over her breasts to give the image a level of depth.
Shown against a vivid green backdrop and rendered in flattened colour and thick, bold lines, Ruth With Cigarette 5 is a decidedly modern portrait, characteristic of much of Opie’s work from the mid-2000s. Using female lavatory signs as a basic model to draw the sitter, Opie shows Ruth with a floating circle as a head and excludes smaller details like fingers in this portrait. The print exemplifies key themes that run through the artist’s entire oeuvre and what he is renowned for: engagement with art history, use of new technology, and obsession with the human body.
Ruth With Cigarette 5 is indicative of Opie’s interest in Ukiyo-e, a genre of Japanese woodblock prints from the 18th and 19th centuries that often depicted female beauties not meant for exhibition. Opie’s particular interest in Ukiyo-e artist Kitagawa Utamaro comes through in these portraits of Ruth through his depiction of eroticised subject matter and use of flattened colour, cropped format and simplified shapes.
Read more about Ruth by Julian Opie.
ABOUT JULIAN OPIE
British artist Julian Opie challenges traditional approaches to portraiture through his digitally designed and seemingly contradictory, depersonalised works. Working also with landscapes and cityscapes, Opie’s highly stylised work involves the reduction of photographs or short films into figurative reproductions created using computer software. The hallmarks of his artistic style are portraits and animated walking figures, rendered with minimal detail in black line drawing. Learn more about Julian Opie.
